The Lions Were Busy

Doers, Dreamers And Deeds In The Age Of Franklin Roosevelt`s New Deal

May 29, 1988|By Reviewed by Harry S. Ashmore, an author who is completing a biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins.

Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal

By Joseph P. Lash

Doubleday, 510 pages, $24.95

``Some came to Washington to make the system better, some came to make it work,`` Ben Cohen said of the remarkable company of young men and women who gravitated to the capital when Franklin Roosevelt rallied a dispirited nation in the grip of the Great Depression.

These were the dealers and dreamers, the idealists and the pragmatists, who created the New Deal under the orchestration of the jaunty master politician who picked their brains as he went about shoring up the shattered economy, only to discard most of them when the shifting tides of public opinion dictated a change of course.

A literate and loquacious lot, they kept diaries and left behind published memoirs and oral histories that have been mined by the hundreds of historians and political scientists who have appraised their lives and times. Their story is familiar enough, but Joseph Lash brings to it a rare combination of intimacy and detachment.

He claims no role for himself, and has no position to defend. But as a youthful protege of Eleanor Roosevelt he knew most of the principals, and later, while writing four biographical works on the redoubtable First Lady, he had access to the aging lions as they sorted out their memories.

Lash has not lost his original sympathy for the dreamers whose idealism kept the issue of social justice on the New Deal agenda. But he sees now that it was the dealers, working within the limits of what the canny President deemed to be politically possible, who left their imprint on the American polity.

The polar views that divided the inner circle around Roosevelt were represented by the original brain truster, Rex Tugwell, and the Wilsonian reformer, Justice Louis Brandeis. During the first term, before his influence waned, Tugwell was the principal exponent of fundamental structural change as opposed to temporary measures to deal with the short term effects of the collapsed economy.

Tugwell believed in central planning and direct governmental intervention to control the cyclical economic swings produced by the laissez-faire policy that had prevailed through most of the nation`s history.

Arrayed against Tugwell were the disciples of Justice Brandeis, who believed the government`s role should be limited to breaking up the great concentrations of economic and political power amassed by the trusts.

Ranging between the poles was Felix Frankfurter, the indefatigable Harvard Law School professor who salted the New Deal agencies with the best and brightest of his graduates. Lash concentrates on the role of the legal activists derisively labeled by the anti-New Deal press as ``Frankfurter`s happy hot dogs.``

The most effective of these were the ebullient Boston Irishman, Thomas Corcoran, and the shy, gentle midwestern Jew, Ben Cohen.

Corcoran and Cohen are key figures in Lash`s highly readable account of the high drama that marked the inner struggle for power in the heady New Deal years. In the end he absolves all the players-including FDR, the stage manager, whose cavalier treatment of loyal supporters he came to see as a requirement of his office. The dreamers thought they had lost out when, as a protesting Eleanor Roosevelt put it, the New Deal was ``laid away in lavender`` with the advent of war. But Lash concludes:

``Of all the New Dealers who pressed FDR to move forward, Eleanor was the most insistent. But even she had to admit, as Hopkins did in 1940, and Ben Cohen would in retrospect, that Roosevelt was the firm hand on the New Deal tiller and that while he often tacked and veered, his sure sense of priorities was in quest of, not despite the American dream.``